The Soul of Baseball (20 page)

“When Jackie Robinson crossed the color line, that was the beginning of the modern-day civil rights movement,” Buck said. “I say ‘modern-day civil rights movement’ because the first civil rights movement began down in Egyptland, didn’t it?”

A woman yelled “Amen!” A man shouted “Preach it, brother!”

“My God needed a man. A strong man. And my God sent a man named Moses. That’s what my God did.” (“Amen!” “You preach, Buck!” “Hallelujah!”) “Then, here in this land, we were in bondage. Weren’t we?” (“Yes we were!” “Amen!”) “My God needed a strong man. My God sent Abraham Lincoln.” (“Yes he did!”) “But ol’ Abe Lincoln couldn’t do it alone. So my God sent Frederick Douglass. My God sent…Sojourner Truth. Harriet Tubman. Yes. That’s what my God did.”

The sound of the organ rose and fell. Amens echoed.

“And, in my time, we were in bondage. We could not eat in the white restaurants. We could not sleep in the white hotels. We could not play baseball because of our beautiful tans. God needed a man. He sent us Jackie Robinson.”

Buck’s voice grew quiet.

“But before Jackie Robinson, there were men who played baseball. And we were good. We could play, man. Double Duty Radcliffe could play. People who saw us, man, we could play. We made a difference in this world. Duty made a difference.”

And then he sang his song, his verse, “The greatest thing in all my life is loving you.” At the end, Buck was crying.

O
N THE WAY
to the small reception in the back room, someone asked Buck O’Neil for an autograph. He said, “I don’t think you should do this here.” He signed it anyway.

“God bless you, Buck,” a woman said as she hugged him.

“He’s already done that,” Buck said.

Buck took some fried chicken and sat down. He ate slowly and with his head down. Commotion rained around him. Women cried, men laughed, strangers hugged. Al Spearman walked around, looking for a table, and then a young boy, ten years old, walked up to him. The boy asked: “Are you somebody?”

“Excuse me?” Spearman asked sharply. The boy froze.

“I mean are you somebody famous?” the boy asked. But Spearman did not hear. He saw something in the boy’s hand. “What’s that?” Spearman asked. And the boy showed Spearman a baseball card. Spearman’s eyes bulged. His face blushed. He said, “Let me have that for a minute, boy,” and he swiped the card, and he started walking fast toward Buck. It was a card of Johnny Washington.

“Look at this! Look at this!” he shouted. People blocked his path. Spearman could not get around the table to Buck, so he was now shouting at anyone who would listen. He shouted about how this man, this fraud, was handing out his baseball cards like he was somebody, like he had played on those fields with rocks scattered along the base paths, like he had slept on buses bumping along two-lane roads, like he had eaten stale sandwiches in towns where restaurant owners would not serve black men. Spearman looked as if he might burst out of his skin when a man—the man who had acted as if he were in charge—walked over.

“Al, you are going to have to quiet down,” he said.

“But this Johnny Washington—”

“Al, quiet down. This is not the place. We’ve all heard you already.”

“But, no, this man is—”

“Al, you will have to quiet down or I’m going to have to make you quiet down.”

“What, you’re threatening me now? You’re threatening me?”

Spearman walked away shouting, “This man is threatening me! He’s threatening me for telling the truth! Said he’s going to ‘make’ me quiet down! This man here”—and he pointed, and shouted. Buck quietly ate his chicken. Al Spearman thundered until no one listened anymore.

A
MAN WALKED
over to Buck O’Neil and said, “I don’t mean to interrupt you, sir, but you are an inspiration to me.”

Buck looked up and said: “Do you remember the first baseball game your father ever took you to?”

The man looked surprised. He said he did remember. It was 1951 at Comiskey Park. He was five years old. The man did not remember who the White Sox played, who won the game, or even whether it was day or night. He thought it was a day game, a Sunday, though what he really remembered was that Minnie Minoso hit a home run. Buck had been right. Someone famous always hits a home run at a boy’s first baseball game.

“You know, Minnie Minoso is here,” Buck said.

“I did know that. I’ve met him a few times. He is my hero.”

“Mine too,” Buck said. “Great hitter. Great player.”

“He should be in the Hall of Fame. And so should you.”

“Isn’t it funny? Everybody remembers going to their first baseball game with their father. They might not remember going to their first day of school with their mother. They don’t remember their first football game or their first Thanksgiving dinner. But they always remember going to the baseball game with their father.”

“Why do you think that is, Buck?”

“I don’t know,” Buck said. I had never heard him say those three words before.

It was time to go. The car was on its way to take us back to the airport. Buck said: “Wait one minute. There’s something I have to do.”

A
L
S
PEARMAN WAS
alone and ranting in the hallway when Buck walked over. He put his arm around Al’s shoulder and said, very softly, “Al, I want you to listen to me.”

“Buck, I—”

“Al, let me say something. You know he didn’t play. We know the truth. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right….”

He kept repeating the phrase, over and over—it’s all right—as if he wanted to hypnotize Al Spearman. He kept trying to get Al to look into his eyes, though Al could not seem to focus for very long.

“It’s all right, Al,” Buck said. “Maybe this man needs this.”

“Needs this?”

“Maybe this man needs people to believe that he played in the Negro Leagues. Maybe this is what is keeping this man alive, see? It’s all right. Let the man be. We know.”

“But, Buck, this guy is a—”

“We know. It’s all right. You know. I know. That’s all that matters. It’s all right.”

For a moment, it seemed like Al Spearman’s demons had passed. He slumped his shoulders and seemed to nod. And then, suddenly, he began shouting again, “No, it’s not all right! Listen here, this man, he’s a fraud, I have pictures, look at this picture.” And he pulled out the same photograph, the one that showed Johnny Washington without a red credential. Buck shook his head and walked away. Al followed Buck into the bathroom. Spearman’s voice got louder and louder, and you could hear him through the door. He came out still shouting.

Buck turned to Al Spearman and said, “I’ve got to go now.”

“You’ll think about what I told you. This man, he’s tainting all of us. He’s a fraud.”

“I’ll think about it, Al.” And Buck pushed open the glass doors in the front of the church. He turned back to Spearman and whispered—so softly that Spearman could not have heard—“Let go, Al. Just let go.”

T
HE RIDE BACK
to the airport was quiet. The sun burned hot, the car air conditioner blasted cold air through its vents, and Buck looked out the window at the liquor stores and abandoned lots and weeds and places selling gyros. A man and a woman walked down the street, hand in hand. Each of them clutched a brown paper bag wrapped around a bottle.

Buck said: “It’s sad to see how many people live in pain.”

B
uck O’Neil could not stop watching when the baseball steroid hearings raged on television. He felt strangely connected to it all, though few people knew less about performance-enhancing drugs. He read stories about the drugs—human growth hormone, the cream, the clear, andro, creatine—and it seemed like Chinese to him. He never could understand how much any of these substances helped a man hit a baseball or pitch one. He did not want to know. People were always surprised that Buck did not have strong feelings about how bad steroids were for baseball. He did worry about the kids ruining their bodies, but the cheating part did not move him much. In the Negro Leagues, he had known players to bend the rules to win—they corked bats, spit on the ball, popped amphetamines, stole signals, and even loaded up on coffee for the caffeine. They wanted to win. “The only reason players in my time didn’t use steroids,” he would say sometimes, “is because we didn’t have them.”

Something else about the steroids hearings chilled him. Great baseball players—men he knew—wore dark suits. Lawyers flanked them. Members of Congress asked questions. The players offered statements about how much they loved baseball. And Buck felt an overpowering sadness—it was like baseball was on trial. There was Rafael Palmeiro, the great first baseman who in the very next season would become only the fourth man ever to collect three thousand hits and five hundred home runs. Palmeiro talked about coming over with his family from Cuba when he was just a baby. He said his family fled the terror of Castro so he could live the American dream.

“I have never used steroids, period,” Palmeiro had said, and then, punctuating his statement Bill Clinton style, he pointed at the camera.

“He’s lying,” Buck said.

Sammy Sosa spoke. He was an American phenomenon just a few years before. Sosa had come from the Dominican Republic and he shared his quintessential baseball tale. He had shined shoes to help his mother and six brothers and sisters survive. Sosa started playing baseball at fourteen—he had boxed when he was younger—and he used a milk carton for a glove and a pipe for a bat. Sosa took to baseball. In 1998, he and Mark McGwire hit home runs at a pace previously unknown in the Major Leagues. They both broke Roger Maris’s hallowed record of sixty-one home runs, and they just kept on hitting baseballs over fences. Fans were captivated. Stadiums were packed. Baseball, after almost falling into the abyss over a labor problem, was the national pastime again. Sosa rekindled so many of the old feelings in Chicago. He was like Ernie Banks. He played the game with unadulterated joy. He ran around the outfield before every game. He tapped his heart and blew kisses to heaven after each home run. When talking about the game, he said: “Baseball has been berry, berry good to me.” America was charmed. Sosa hit sixty-six home runs that year, which would have been a record had it not been for McGwire. The next year, he hit sixty-three more home runs, and two years later, sixty-four more. Few wanted to delve too deeply into the mystery of how a skinny kid who had never hit more than forty home runs in a season could suddenly look like a professional wrestler and slug home runs at Babe Ruth’s pace. As Buck would say, “We wanted to believe. We needed to believe.”

“I do a lot of charity work with young people,” Sosa told the congressional committee. Sosa said he would never put anything dangerous like steroids in his body.

“He might be lying too,” Buck said.

Then there was the star witness. Mark McGwire. While Sosa became America’s mascot—rags to riches and all that—McGwire became Superman. He stood six foot five, looked sturdier than the Chrysler Building, and before games, during batting practice, he mashed monstrous home runs that soared and crashed against the cheapest upper-deck seats. Nobody had ever hit a baseball like this. Thousands of people left work early, raced home to grab their children, and rushed to the ballpark hours early just to watch McGwire take batting practice. McGwire became living history. Seeing him hit homers was like watching Neil Armstrong step on the moon. “You will remember this all your life,” fathers told sons.

There was, even then, a nagging feeling that McGwire had pushed beyond the limits of natural power. In his record-breaking year, a reporter noticed a bottle of androstenedione in McGwire’s locker. Andro, as it would be called to help the newspaper headline writers, was a legal substance then in society and baseball. Other sports had banned it. Doctors quoted in the papers said it was a “natural hormone” and a “precursor to testosterone.” Weight lifters nodded knowingly—they knew andro worked pretty much like a steroid. But in that magical season, nobody wanted to hear about the dungeons and dragons of Mark McGwire. He hit the record-breaking home run and cameras flashed, and he lifted his son at home plate. He hugged the family of Roger Maris. He hit home run number seventy on the last day of the season, and he ran the bases to deafening cheers. A portion of Interstate 70 in Missouri was named for him. The reporter who found the andro was scolded for snooping in other people’s lockers.

In the hearing room barely more than six years later, McGwire looked thinner. It wasn’t just his body. He looked hollowed somehow.

“I live a quiet life with my wife and children,” McGwire said. His voice was pleading.

McGwire offered to be a spokesman against steroids. He offered to help teach children that using steroids was wrong. But he did not admit using steroids. He did not explain why using steroids was wrong. He did not say much. There was something vaguely admirable about McGwire—unlike the others, he did not proclaim his innocence—but the longer his testimony continued, the longer he refused to say anything, the more absurd he became, until finally he crossed beyond absurdity and became pathetic and sad.

“What I will not do, however, is participate in naming names,” McGwire said.

“I’m not here to talk about the past,” McGwire said.

When he stepped down after his testimony, Mark McGwire was no longer Superman. No one except for the truest believers had any doubts left. He had used steroids. They all had. Palmeiro, just weeks after venting and pointing at the camera, flunked a Major League steroid test. For days afterward, weeks even, the news stations and newspapers focused on this “black eye for baseball.” Buck stared at the television even after the hearings were over. He realized why he felt so sad. Nobody had spoken for baseball.

M
ONTHS LATER
, B
UCK
O’Neil was sitting in a black car. Rain splashed against the windows. It was pouring in Washington. Buck stared at gray buildings outlined against the gray sky. Washington looked very different in the rain. A few weeks earlier, he had been in Washington on the hottest day of the summer. For weeks he would talk about how he had never been that hot in his life, not even in Florida. Now, though, it was cool. Umbrellas floated along sidewalks. Taxicabs sprayed water over curbs. Buck had come to testify before Congress.

His testimony was a formality revolving around a formality. A Missouri senator, Jim Talent, submitted a bill that would grant national designation to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City—in essence make it “America’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.” Everybody around the museum thought this was a very good idea, though nobody seemed exactly sure what it meant or why it would make any difference. It sounded good. Buck came out to Washington to testify on behalf of his museum. Washington insiders called this a “dog-and-pony show.”

“I’ve never testified before Congress,” Buck said happily, as if it had been high on his list. The car pulled up to the Russell Senate Office Building. Buck was told this was the oldest of the Senate office buildings. He enjoyed the trivia. Everything about this day seemed exciting to him, and new. He followed aides through several corridors and hallways until we reached the office of Jim Talent. From there, he was taken to a room. A glass lectern was set up in the middle of the room. Jim Talent said a few words to the people seated there, and then Buck was called up. He spoke about how wonderful it was to play in the Negro Leagues, and how important it was to him that the memories stayed alive.

And then he told a story—a rare story—about his wife of fifty-one years, Ora Lee Owens.

Buck hardly ever talked about Ora. He spoke often about how they met, in Memphis, Tennessee, Easter Sunday of 1943, but after that she disappeared from his narrative. Sometimes, when among friends, he would say she was loyal and loving, and she hated his driving. Ora’s faults had faded in his memory since her death, her quirks too. Once, on a long plane ride, Buck talked about how much he loved children. I asked him why they never had any. He would usually joke about childlessness (“We had a lot of fun trying” was the usual punch line), but on that day, thirty-two thousand feet above the ground, he grimaced and said, “I was never around. I loved Ora very much. But she knew that baseball was my life.” In his voice you could hear the echoes of late-night arguments and long-distance phone calls. Buck broke the long silence by asking about a young Kansas City Royals pitcher. Ora did not come up again.

In this room in Washington, Buck talked about the day the new Negro Leagues Museum opened. That was 1997. Ora Lee was dying; cancer had ravaged her. She kept telling Buck that she just wanted to see the museum open. It was, in so many ways, what their lives had been about. “Our child,” Buck said. On the day of the opening, Ora was still living, but only barely. She could not make it out. She told Buck to go. And he did.

That evening there was a party to celebrate the opening. The next day Buck was at a baseball-card show when he had a feeling. He excused himself and went to spend those hours with Ora.

“She said, ‘I made it,’” Buck said. “And she died in my arms.”

Some of the people sitting in chairs let tears roll down their faces. They asked Buck a few questions about what this national designation would mean, and Buck answered as best he could considering that he had no idea. He signed a few autographs and talked to reporters afterward. When it ended, he hugged Jim Talent and said, “That wasn’t so hard. Testifying before Congress.”

“That wasn’t Congress, Buck,” a friend said. “That was a press conference. You don’t testify until later.”

Buck smiled, and his face blushed crimson. He said, “Oh. Okay. Well, it still wasn’t so hard.”

T
O
B
UCK
, W
ASHINGTON
seemed in constant motion—like a baseball field during a triple. Aides rushed this way, senators rushed that way, nobody seemed to have an instant to waste. The pace fascinated Buck for a while, but then it made him dizzy and woozy, the way people feel on that third day in Las Vegas. “How come people run around here so much and yet all anybody says is that nothing gets done?” he asked Jim Talent.

“You just touched on the Great American Question, Buck,” Talent said.

Buck found himself pushed and pulled through a maze of hallways and a series of elevators. Buck had absolutely no idea where he was going or where he had come from, and he did not want to ask. Here was Hillary Clinton’s office. There was a famous statue. Here was where some bill was conceived. There was a little television studio. Here was an underground tunnel. Buck felt like the children in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. He was taken from strange room to strange room, and felt too awed and scared and eager to ask what would happen next. After a walk, Buck was helped onto a little subway. His curiosity got him.

“What’s this?” Buck asked.

“This is a train to the Capitol.”

“Whee!” Buck yelled, and the subway traveled about five hundred yards.

B
UCK COULD SEE
Washington’s stars and power brokers in every direction as we sat down in the Senate Dining Room. He did not know who they were, but he knew they were stars. Samuel Alito, nominee for the Supreme Court, ate a sandwich at this table, while New Mexico’s Senator Pete Domenici had the salad at that one. On a whisper, Buck turned left to see Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter—that may have been the first time anyone in Washington had found Specter by looking left. The other Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum, walked over to shake Buck’s hand.

“Look at me,” Buck said. “Senator O’Neil.”

He ordered the Senate bean soup after being told it was famous. He ordered light because the woman serving said to save room for the peach cobbler. He talked about steroids and baseball, the struggles of his Kansas City Royals and the sadness he felt because so many kids had stopped playing baseball. Then he said the peach cobbler was fabulous. Jim Talent excused himself, walked away, and returned barely a minute later. “Quick bathroom break,” Buck said.

“No, that wasn’t a bathroom break,” Talent said. “I had to go vote.”

“You mean, you just went up and voted on something?”

“Yes,” Talent said, and he pointed up to a clock that showed when the next vote was to take place. Buck shook his head.

“I sure wish my mother had lived to see me here,” he said.

B
UCK HAD NOT
asked anybody what he was supposed to say at the hearing. He expected to talk about his love of baseball and the Negro Leagues, and nobody told him any different. A statement on his behalf was submitted to the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks. Buck never saw it.

Because this bill went through the subcommittee that over-saw national parks, there were others there to make cases for their various causes. A man talked about the Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area Act. A woman made a passionate plea to get more money for sites honoring past U.S. presidents. She said many of these sites were in desperate shape. She said the Chester A. Arthur site, in particular, needed massive renovating. Senator Daniel Akaka from Hawaii, who chaired the committee that day, hardly seemed impressed. Someone in the back whispered that Chester A. Arthur himself had needed massive renovation.